Citi (C) Loses $12 Billion

Earlier it was reported that Citigroup (C) could lose $10 billion or more. The actual loss from continuing ops came in at $12.14 billion. The headling of the release says the company lost only $8.29 billion, but that includes a few billion in gains from selling the retail banking business in Germany.

There's obviously not much good news in here. Whereas Jamie Dimon made only sober comments -- despite the fact that earnings were not horrendous -- Pandit is trying to stay upbeat and focus on the positive:

“Our results continued to be depressed by an unprecedented dislocation in capital markets and a weak economy. However, a number of our core customer franchises continued to perform well as Citi’s customers remain active and engaged with us. We continued to make progress on our primary goal in 2008—which was to get fit. We significantly strengthened Tier 1 and structural liquidity, we reduced our balance sheet, expenses, and headcount. We also made significant progress in reducing risk from our balance sheet. Our legacy assets declined to approximately $300 billion, over $300 billion of assets are now covered by a loss sharing arrangement, and we added $14 billion to our loan loss reserves. We expect reduced volatility from marks in 2009 as a result of actions we’ve taken to reduce risk, and reclassify certain securities and loans from trading and available or hold for sale to hold to maturity or held for investment.

Among the big losers, the credit card business, where revneue fell 27%, and losses came to $610 million.The institutional clients business had op losses of $9.5 billion -- that's the writedowns on the worst of the company's "toxic" assets.